Category Archives: Leadership Perspectives

By Bill Fathers, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Services Business Unit at VMware

We’ve arrived at a pivotal turning point in IT. As the pace of innovation continues to accelerate and our technology begins catching up with our imaginations, the greater challenge is no longer building the next disruptive product, but providing a cloud infrastructure model that can deliver it anywhere, at anytime. For those who’ve been paying attention, this shift will come as no surprise. I first recognized the significance of infrastructure during my military service.

As an officer in the British Army, you are taught how to fight conventional battles, with established rules of engagement and clarity of purpose. We didn’t have that in Sarajevo. The UN peacekeeping mission was comprised of nations who had never worked together before, certainly not in a very high-pressure environment.

At the height of the war, Sarajevo was blockaded, bombarded and under constant sniper fire. Water was cut off and Bosnian forces were preventing even medical supplies from entering. Still, the city endured. Then, somebody literally stole the mobile phone network installed by a multinational firm a few years earlier, and everything went to total mayhem.

And so I learned the gravity of infrastructure. That realization would inform my trajectory for decades to come.

Coinciding with VMware’s One Cloud, Any Application launch event on Feb. 2, CEO Pat Gelsinger joined thought leaders from across industries to delve into the topic of market disruption. The panel, moderated by Quentin Hardy, deputy tech editor for the New York Times, also included Geoffrey Moore, managing director of Geoffrey Moore Consulting, Casey Gerald, CEO of MBAxAmerica, and Renaud Laplanche, CEO of Lending Club.

Following a discussion about disruption in each respective industry, Moderator Quentin Hardy asks each panelist what they would like to disrupt that would help solve a macro issue related to their areas of expertise. Hear what these industry thought leaders had to say in the video below.

To view a recording of the entire 40-minute panel discussion, click on the video here:

By Bill Fathers, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Services Business Unit

I think it’s fair to characterize the last five or so years as an experiment in the merit and feasibility of cloud-based enterprise IT. To be sure, the notion of taking corporate workloads and data off-prem was hardly a guaranteed sell at the outset, but with the explosion and rising ubiquity of XaaS, it’s starting to look like cloud is not only here to stay, but has entered the professional era.

As far as enterprise is concerned, the term “cloud,” will refer increasingly to the hybrid cloud—just as “smartphone” simply became “phone.” What’s driving this expedited rate of adoption, and the standardization of the hybrid use case? As with most paradigm shifts, a confluence of factors is responsible.

Public-only is not enough

For many organizations, public was the first foray into cloud services. And when it comes to accessibility, public cloud has obvious advantages, but its shortcomings are equally apparent in issues like regulatory compliance and data security.

The utility of a hybrid approach is, therefore, fairly obvious: some data and workloads simply need to reside onsite. But when proximity isn’t a concern, you should have the ability to extend into the public cloud, where storage and compute is both cheaper and more accessible.

VMware Partner Exchange 2015 wrapped up last week and it was truly a fantastic event. We dared attendees to “Thrive” as we unveiled a major product launch, acquisitions and partnerships. During the Partner Exchange general session, VMware President and Chief Operating Officer Carl Eschenbach challenged three members of the company’s leadership team to describe the value proposition of a specific part of the business in just five minutes or less! Read on to watch videos of:

Today from 12:30-1:30pm PT, VMware will be hosting a Twitter chat to discuss recent news and the major developments in enterprise technology this year. Tweet your questions to #VMchat before the event and then tune in live here:

Looking back on my first full year leading the End-User Computer (EUC) team at VMware, I can’t help but echo Pat Gelsinger’s comments at VMworld: what a difference a year makes!

Since joining the team in August 2013, we have been working to fulfill our vision of delivering a virtual workspace to allow end-users to work at the speed of life. 2014 has proven to be a momentous year as we have shown the world our leap into leadership positions across desktop, mobile and content collaboration. As we jumpstart 2015, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the amazing accomplishments of 2014 and share some predictions on how I see VMware continuing to grow, excel and be the best for our customers in 2015. None of this would be possible without an incredible End-User Computing TEAM here at VMware that I am honored and grateful to lead.